The weblog of Norman Geras

February 28, 2006

Her roots, in Erith, south-east London, were working-class, but she stubbornly refused to fit any stereotype, her deadpan diatribes about everyday irritations resonating with millions.
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She had a wealth of subjects to grumble about: motorway service stations, the trains, inane daytime television commercials for sun awnings or loans, all delivered in a downbeat fashion that belied a penetrating insight to social trends.

I remember Linda Smith for one joke in particular, which I borrowed here. There's a tribute by Jeremy Hardy, and some words here from Laurie Taylor:

One of her great loves was modern jazz, a passion we shared. Not only was she one of the busiest and most successful comedians in the country but she still found time to be a tireless promoter of humanism.

The right kind of anti-Semites are the ones who wear jackboots and swastika armbands, and not the ones who sport keffiyahs or long beards. And the right kind of Jews? Not Oliver Feingold, whose entitlement to elementary human decency is forfeit because of his employers' shameful fascist sympathies seventy years ago (support for contemporary tyrants somehow doesn't have the same impact on Ken). Not the Board of Deputies, who are not entitled to receive a simple apology. Not any Jew living in Israel, since, as Ken's honoured guest Sheikh al-Qaradawi has made abundantly clear, they are justly under sentence of death for being in the wrong place - a sentence passed by a jurisdiction which does not recognize a minimum age of legal responsibility.

He [Shlomo Venezia] only tells the Lazio players the basics. He doesn't, for example, explain everything he saw, like the newborn they once found in one of the chambers, miraculously still alive under the pile of corpses, suckling at the breast of its dead mother. He doesn't tell what happened to the newborn, either. Those are his stories - stories that visit him in the night.

Now, before him, he sees the Lazio players, dressed in pin-stripes and expensive shoes, their hair dyed blond. It is completely silent; nobody ventures a question. Mayor Veltroni says he brought the players together with the Holocaust survivors in the heart of Rome to demonstrate that Italy's capital has no patience for fascist symbols and swastika flags. "These symbols don't belong in this city," he says.

I'm not Jewish, though some of my best friends are, but if I were I would be worrying about whether or not I should worry... about being Jewish.

The first worry is about whether or not it's worth the time to worry.

When Jewish friends discussed their worries, I would always say: don't worry! In no state in the west is the Jewish community other than honoured, its religion freely practised, its rights protected, its sufferings remembered. A Jew can be secular, indifferent to old customs and religion, dissolve ethnicity into that of his or her homeland - especially where it's a catch-all-ethnicities designation such as British or Canadian. Don't look at the present and future through Nazi-tinted spectacles! From the horrors of the Holocaust has come a prophylactic against murderous anti-Semitism.

I wouldn't say that with such confidence now. I wouldn't say the reverse - that is, worry! - with confidence either. It is just not clear what the state of anti-Semitism is in the west. And that is worrying.
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The archbishop wrote to the chief rabbi, assuring him that the decision isn't a boycott, and that he believed in Israel's right to exist and defend itself. (A telling remark: of how many states in the world would a public figure feel it necessary to protest he believes that it should not be rubbed off the map?)
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The vote of the Synod may well never be acted on. Neville White, secretary of the church's Ethical Investments Advisory Group, told me the group was not bound by the Synod's deliberations - though its next meeting would discuss the decision. He also said, however, that, as far as he knew, this was the first such recommendation to disinvest in a company because of the country that buys its goods (according to Caterpillar, indirectly, through the US government).

No vote then, to disinvest from companies supplying equipment to China, which has a hideous human rights record, including the suppression of Christians. Nor of Russia, which has killed many more Chechens than Israel has Palestinians. Nor Sudan, whose government has been complicit in the massacres of up to 400,000 people in its Darfur region. Nor - to be ecumenical - the US, which continues to operate Guantanamo Bay detention centre amid allegations that its treatment of prisoners amounts to torture.

The Dalai Lama begins then to speak about his admiration for the Jewish people.

"It seems to me that Jewish people are very noisy, but very hard-working. I appreciate that," he said. But when he was on an El-Al flight, he wanted to cover his ears as the Israeli passengers came aboard.
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Should Israel meet with the Hamas? he was asked. "It is too early to tell," he replied, then called on the Hamas "to give up its violent ways."
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[H]e concluded by telling the audience that over one million Tibetans had been murdered by the Chinese. But they had never lost hope. He wants to bring hope to this part of the world, too.

The problem is that the electoral system used for the elections gave grossly unrepresentative results in which Hamas won nearly a super-majority of seats even though the party did not win even a majority of votes.

There's a long and interesting piece in the New Yorker on the pursuit of happiness and its slow historical genesis. One of the conclusions:

The psychological study of happiness might seem to be something of a bust. Mainly it tells us things that people have known for a long time, except with scientific footnotes. In the end, the philosophy and the science converge on the fact that thinking about your own happiness does not make it any easier to be happy. A co-founder of positive psychology, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, made people carry a pager, and told them that every time it went off they should write down what they were doing and how much they were enjoying it. The idea was to avoid the memory's tendency to focus on peaks and troughs, and to capture the texture of people's lives as they were experiencing them, rather than in retrospect. The study showed that people were most content when they were experiencing what Csikzentmihalyi called "flow" - in Haidt's definition, "the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one's abilities." We are at our happiest when we are absorbed in what we are doing; the most useful way of regarding happiness is, to borrow a phrase of Clive James's, as "a by-product of absorption."

The trouble is that asking yourself about your frame of mind is a sure way to lose your flow. If you want to be happy, don't ever ask yourself if you are. A person in good health in a Western liberal democracy is, in terms of his objective circumstances, one of the most fortunate human beings ever to have walked the surface of the earth. Risk-taking Ig and worried Og [two hunter-gatherers from 100,000 BC] both would have regarded our easy, long, riskless lives with incredulous envy. They would have regarded us as so lucky that questions about our state of mind wouldn't be worth asking. It is a perverse consequence of our fortunate condition that the question of our happiness, or lack of it, presses unhappily hard on us.

'The man with... one of the coolest jazz nicknames in history was born John Haley Sims...' - later Zoot Sims. This is a story about him:

Zoot was standing out in the alley back of a club between sets where he was playing when a bum came up and said, "I only need seventy five cents more to buy a drink." Zoot reached in his pocket and gave him the money. After the bum walked away up the alley, Zoot ran after him, stopped him and said, "Wait a minute. How do I know you're not going to go around the corner and buy a bowl of soup?"

The removal of Saddam Hussein was branded a mistake by a majority in 21 of the countries. On average, 45% of those questioned agreed that removing him was a mistake, with 36% supporting the action. In Britain, 40% of those polled said it was a mistake, while 49% backed it.
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Those most in favour of US-led forces staying until Iraq was stable were the US and Afghanistan 58%, Australia 57% and Britain 56%. [My emphases.]

I can't absolutely swear to this, but I do believe I've read rather a lot - including in the newspaper in which the above report appears - telling me different about opinion on such matters in Britain.

It will be held outside the Danish consulate at One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, 885 Second Avenue, on FRIDAY, MARCH 3RD, FROM 12:00 PM TO 1:00 PM. (A fitting... emulation of the hugely successful D.C. version.)

I'd love to be there, but there's the Atlantic Ocean. If you can be, be.

There seems to be a misconception concerning Livingstone's behaviour that has now entrenched itself in the current debate over his suspension by the Board of Standards. He did not simply insult a Jewish journalist by suggesting that he had worked as a Nazi concentration camp guard and then refuse to apologize for the comment. He reacted to criticism of this insult by publishing an article in the Guardian under the title 'This is about Israel, not anti-semitism' (March 4 2005), in which he sought to change the topic of discussion by insisting that the problem is not anti-Semitism but Israel's 'racist' policies. (I responded to this piece with a letter in the Guardian, which can be found here.) Livingstone followed up on this sterling performance with his virtual justification of Palestinian suicide bombing ('Palestinians don't have jet fighters, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In that unfair balance, that's what people use...'), delivered at his press conference on July 19 2005. On this occasion he unconditionally condemned terrorist attacks against civilians in Britain and the United States, while expressing understanding for assaults on Israeli civilians. For the past two years he has been promoting Yusef al-Qaradawi as a progressive religious figure and a leading moderate, as a means of recruiting support among Islamist groups like the MAB. His comment to Oliver Feingold may have been an ill-considered act, but the manner in which he dealt with the reaction to it was not. Livingstone's subsequent conduct was an integral part of a cynical campaign of divisive ethnic politics that he has been pursuing for electoral advantage.

The current defence of his insult as legitimate if offensive political expression indicates a general refusal to take seriously the deeply racist nature of his political strategy. He systematically provokes Jews in order to curry favour with a variety of political and religious constituencies. Interestingly, he incurs no serious political damage for this policy. While one can agree that it is unacceptable for an unelected administrative committee to suspend an elected official for a non-criminal act, this does not conclude the matter. Where is the general public opprobrium that one would expect as a corrective to such behaviour in a genuinely liberal society? Its absence suggests that for a large part of British public opinion this behaviour is entirely acceptable and offers no cause for alarm. It is a mistake to insist on an apology from a political figure who is sufficiently depraved as to regard ethnic politics as a legitimate instrument of self-advancement. And to come on bended knee with a request for an apology, as the official leadership of the Jewish Community has repeatedly done, is worse - as irrelevant in this context as it is self-debasing.

It is worth contrasting the widespread support accorded to Livingstone in the face of his suspension with the intense public pressure exerted on the former US Senate majority leader Trent Lott, in response to his sympathetic recollection of Strom Thurmond's segregationist campaign for the presidency during Thurmond's 100th birthday celebration in December 2002. Lott's remarks drew sharp criticism from both the White House and other Republican members of Congress (neither of these widely known for their concern with civil rights), as well as from all quarters of the American media and mainstream public opinion. As a result, Lott was forced to resign as Senate majority leader. It is certainly necessary to defend both freedom of speech and the sovereignty of the electorate in the face of political censorship. However, these liberties are largely empty if they are not accompanied by vigorous criticism of bigoted views and radically misconceived conduct in the public domain. It seems that Jew-baiting is both politically correct and electorally expedient in contemporary Britain. (Shalom Lappin)

Wendy James's first novel, Out of the Silence, was published by Random House Australia in October 2005. (Foreign rights still available!) Her short stories have been published in various literary journals and anthologies. Wendy lives in Armidale, NSW, with her husband and four children. Here she writes an appreciation of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.

Wendy James on Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

The novel's spirit is the spirit of continuity: each work is an answer to preceding ones, each work contains all the previous experience of the novel. (Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel)

Conclusions may be, as George Eliot once remarked, 'the weak points of most authors', but it should be a universally acknowledged truth (and one that offers a partial excuse to the much put-upon author) that the end of a novel is never the end of the story. Some narratives live on in the mind of the reader indefinitely - characters, events, the narrative voice, all are absorbed, assimilated; the most powerful narratives can inform the reader's present, influence their future, transform their understanding of the past. The most resonant stories gradually assume a myth-like status, become part of a cultural consciousness. Such stories exist perpetually in a kind of literary imaginary, where the possibilities of new narratives - retellings, variations, subversions, extensions, revisions, even refutations of the original - are endlessly generated.

Jean Rhys's 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, is one such retelling that has become as much a part of my own literary consciousness as its inspiration, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Like Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea is a novel of female development, and like its predecessor has become a classic of English literature - its assimilation to the canon evidenced by its publication by Penguin as a Twentieth-Century Classic, and its inclusion on the syllabuses of secondary English courses and university reading lists. It has been positively critiqued as a feminist text, a postmodern text, a post-colonial text; a cinematic adaptation has been attempted, however unsuccessfully. In telling the tragic story of Antoinette Cosway/Bertha Mason - first wife of Jane Eyre's hero Rochester, and the infamous madwoman in the attic - Rhys has provided a disturbing, unforgettable companion to Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece, a novel that, once read, is impossible to factor out of any subsequent re-readings of the original.

The story that Rhys tells is a story with an ending that is already circumscribed, inalterable, written. Marooned, as it were, in a sargasso sea of inevitability, her heroine, Antoinette Cosway (later renamed Bertha) is doomed from the outset. Like the protagonists of Rhys's earlier fiction, the hauntingly beautiful Antoinette is 'cursed' with a nature that is both recklessly passionate and strangely passive - and is subject to conditions over which she has no control. The orphaned heiress to a Creole fortune, Antoinette (in an ironic inversion of recently outlawed slavery) is given 'without question or condition', and along with thirty thousand pounds, to the impecunious Mr Rochester. Despite the newlyweds' initially heady physical attraction, the relationship rapidly degenerates into suspicion and violence - and madness. There is never any real possibility that Rhys's heroine will be allowed to experience the satisfying progression, the ultimate transcendence through love, that Jane savours in the earlier novel.

Wide Sargasso Sea is not only Antoinette's narrative, but belongs to Rochester, too. There's no simplistic rendering of good and evil, victim and villain, here. Rochester himself is a reluctant participant in the arranged marriage. As the second son of an English gentleman, his social position is tenuous and ambiguous; he is untitled, penniless, exiled, and in the novel, literally unnamed. 'I have sold my soul, or you have sold it,' he writes to his father, 'and after all is it such a bad bargain? The girl is thought to be beautiful, is beautiful. And yet...' His experiences in the Caribbean leave him further disconnected and alienated, as he is subject to forces (Antoinette's sensuality, the sultry weather, Christophine's magic, unfamiliar social structures and race relations, political unrest, tropical illness) that confuse and terrify him. Eventually Rochester reasserts his control of the situation: he removes and renames Antoinette, drives her to madness, confines her to the attic, consigns her to her fiery death - but in Rhys's hands he is never shown as less than fully human (he is not always purposely cruel, but misguided, metaphorically blind) and somehow, in the end, he is no less a tragic figure than Antoinette.

Wide Sargasso Sea is a quintessentially 20th century novel - concerned with uncertainty, with the fluidity of truth and fiction, of past and present, appearances and reality, madness and sanity - and yet remains elementally connected to the concerns of its mother-narrative. It's a 'historical novel', of course, but Rhys's recreation and apprehension of this past are so complete, so unselfconscious, so unforced, that that becomes almost incidental. In remarkably lucid and deceptively simple prose she gives each of the protagonists a memorable and distinctive voice, while somehow managing to provide a singular, organic vision of the oppressive and potentially violent nature of the world that she's describing. The entire narrative is charged with a relentless, fevered anxiety - a kind of sensory prefiguring of the novel's nightmarish finale. And it's a finale that the reader requires, has always required, almost welcomes. For without Antoinette's tragic end, there can be no triumphant return to Thornfield Hall - and no happy ending - for Jane.

[A list of the pieces that have appeared to date in this series, with the links to them, is here.]